Rating: 
Summary: Best D&D Book I've Ever Had the Priveledge to Look At
Review: I agree with every single person who gave this book five stars. It has description, description, description, great for any Forgotten Realms fan, and races and some Prestige Classes good and adaptable for any campaign. The few people who gave it four stars, which isn't a big deal except that it deserves five, are the people who do the following, lets take Raven Silvernight's review for example. Here is his quote:"1) It is poorly organized and tabbed. There is no section, for instance, on NPCs (and to find one you have to tramp through an enormous Geography section), there is no map section where all of the maps are centrally referanced, and the tabs don't lead me to the nice little areas (like "races") but rather things like "Characters." There is no "Feats" tab, but it is included in with the "Characters" section."
-RAVEN SILVERNIGHT I can bet you all of my money that this person is majorly overweight and can't afford to flip through a fabulous index in fear that he'll have a heart attack from fat collapse. There doesn't need to be an NPC chapter, or a Feats chapter, you just look it up in the index. Whats hard about that? The index has everything you'll want to look up, from the hundreds upon hundreds of places, people, and things in Forgotten Realms that you can explore. So pick up the book, despite its cost. You'll get the money back someday by winning the lottery. So do yourself a favor.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Complete Campaign Setting To Date!
Review: I'm by no means new to DnD, and when I picked up the Forgotten Realms Campaign Book I thought it would be a basic translation from second to third edition rules. When I opened up the book it completely blew me away with all the information and added treats that many other books are lacking. After having the book for 3 weeks I was up and running a campaign based on the Forgotten Realms book and its two compendiums: Magic of Faerun and Monsters of Faerun. All in all the best three DnD books I've seen in a long time!
Rating:
Summary: Another home-run from Wizards
Review: I've overall been very impressed with a majority of the 3rd edition material I've purchased, and this is no exception. The Forgotten Realms sourcebook is stunning in both it's content and production value. Content-wise, the book has more of the all-important prestige classes, and goes into several pages on every geographical region in Faerun (including plots and rumors, and important characters). There's some new magic, but WoTC released Magic of Faerun on the heels of this sourcebook which contains a lot more details on magic in the Forgotten Realms. There's also a small section on monsters of Faerun, but again, there's another sourcebook that goes into more details on that. One other thing I enjoyed was that home regions list automatic and bonus languages that characters from that region would know, as well as (this is the cool part) special feats that only characters from that region can take). There's a wealth of information on the dieties and religeons of Faerun as well as the major organizations that make the land tick. There are even a couple of adventures included. On the production value side, the cover is nice, every page is full color, and the artwork is magnificant - especially the maps!
Rating:
Summary: So complete, it made me love the Realms
Review: Since I started playing *D&D and becoming familiar with the various campaign worlds put out by TSR/WotC, I've always found Forgotten Realms to be my least favorite. To me, Greyhawk is rich in originality, and has a good, dark tone that makes a good backdrop for tough adventures. Krynn is by far my favorite, filled with high fantasy and romance, brought to life by some of the best fantasy novels to grace the market. The Realms is something I've always considered a melting pot of stock fantasy backdrops and super-munchkin character concepts (Drizz't, Elminister, etc). This treatment of the Realms, however, has changed my entire opinion of what I now consider to be an exciting and diverse world, full of possibilities. It's still a melting pot, but this book really plays up the diversity and how all of these different elements connect with each other. The geography and culture contained within the book's pages makes the Realm *real*, the regional feats are a great touch, and all the material in the book works great if nothing more as inspiration and ideas to steal for your own campaign world. Though it's expensive, I've found it to be worth every penny. The prestige classes are, in a word, LAME. However, that's to be forgiven since that's become the norm. Everything else is top-shelf. The book is also deceptively big because of the small typeset and the decision to cram as much information as possible into the book.
Rating:
Summary: Almost Soiled Myself
Review: My title sums it up right there. Thats how I felt when I started reading this book. It is an excellent buy for anybody playing any edition of D&D! The information is well organized and the book reviews all the lands in Forgotten Realms, not just the core realms that the old campaign settings did. I was extremely impressed with the book! Excellent Buy!
Rating:
Summary: Almost Perfect!!!
Review: If you are a starter or a hardcore D&D player, don't even hesitate of buying this Campaign Settings. It is as close to perfect as it can get. It only has one flaw, when you bought one from this setting, you are bound to buy Monsters of Farûn, Magic of Farûn, and all the others that apply to this world. Don't get me wrong it's a perfect world, but also a expensive world. You will love it as a player and DM
Rating: 
Summary: A very, very nice book.
Review: Pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about the Forgotten Realms is somewhere in this book. While it does not focus on any one thing (it's not supposed to; if it did both the page count and price tag would be ludicrous), it does an incredible job of detailing the Realms enough so that you are left with a very clear idea of what kind of place Faerûn is. The artwork is terrific, to say the least. The stuff about the new prestige classes that are introduced is excellent. Ones that I normally wouldn't consider pursuing are still fascinating to read about. I especially liked the entries on the notorious Archmage, Hathran, and Red Wizard. New spells are also introduced, and detail is given on the intriguing Shadow Weave. The book does a fair job of detailing each of the many different regions of Faerûn, and players can further personalize their characters with regional feats (kind of like enviromental-background traits), if they want. One section explains the basic mechanics of different types of portals, which is something that I was not expecting to see addressed at all. I was (pleasantly) surprised to see that there are even entries for tieflings, aasimar, and genasi. The last quarter of the book goes into detail about the Powers of Faerûn, their current statuses (rather important info in Bane's and Waukeen's cases, if you've also read [2E's] Faiths & Avatars), and the cosmology of Abeir-toril. Following that, there is a brief tour through the history of Faerûn. Unsurprisingly, the very end has some (DM) notes on running a campaign in the Forgotten Realms. All in all, this book is well-worth it's hefty price.
Rating:
Summary: Price doesn't matter in this review
Review: First of all, This is an EXELLENT BOOK!! It contains Discriptions for races, what realmsfolk think of classes, special multiclassing monks, regional quirks,feats, and skills, 13Prestige classes, Info about the weave,wild magic, dead magic, and spell fire, Secret lore, portals, and Spells(gasp!) Time and seasons, lore of the land, home and hearth, coin and commerce, magic in society, craft and enginieering(gnomes have invented pistols!), 133 pages of geography wich includes,Exploring Faerun, The underdark, Cormyr, A map of Toril, the sea of night, Selune, and the five wanderers, The book has a couple HUNDRED dieties, what happens in the afterlife, Cosmology, The god of the dieties, a complete history of the world from creation to The capaighns beginning, a 3,372 year timeline(wow!), Organizations such as the Cult Of The Dragon and the Harpers, 2 advenures, Rules for proggressing to level 21 and higher, known dungeons, optional rules, guidelines for not having guidelines, Rewards, A few monsters like the DRACOLICH and undead beholder, maps, names, and tables. As you can see, it has a lot of stuff. The problem is, it has a lot of stuff. It sometimes has stuff that is just a referance that you might never use, or stuff that just doesn't really relate to faerun that much, but don't get me wrong, Most of the stuff in there is some of the best information on a campaign world I've ever read, its VERY detailed.
Rating:
Summary: Can there be too much information?
Review: I think not. This book rocks.
Rating:
Summary: A great resource- not just for Realms games
Review: I figured this would be a 4 star at most, simply because I thought the nature of the book would make it only marginally useful for non-realms campaigns. I was quite happy to discover I was wrong. A great deal of this book is useful in almost any campaign setting. This is due to one main feature of the setting- diversity. I will focus on this aspect in this review, since most reviews already cover how well the book covers the realms Many of the features of these books can be used in almost any campaign. Feats, Spells, Prestige Classes, Races- all of these can be applied to any campaign with little or no modification. Even the starting packages and regionla feats can easily be applied to custom worlds or other published products- I used the Halruua starting package and regional feats to make an Alphatian wizard for the Mystara setting campaign I was in. Some of the book is less useful to other campaigns. The geography section was not terribly helpful as it deals specifically with Forgotten Realms history and geography. However, Some ideas can ve gleaned from the detailed descriptions, and this section can be used as inspiration for plots, nations, and events in a home-brew campaign. If you play FR and want to play third edition, someone in your group (at least the DM) needs to have this book. But even if you play Krynn, Greyhawk, or a home-made world, there is a wealth of info in this book.
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